April 8
Nambla unearthed... Watch out gay community - you'll soon be under attack (once again) and for all the wrong reasons. An association that was initially intended to be an outreach program to young gay men - and was instantly iconoclized (?) into the realm of socially deviant folklore is the foucs of the current Catholic Priest Witchunt. I'm not sure what angers me more... the fact that priests violated the sanctity of their religion (i.e. trust in a relationship) or the fact that EVERYONE KNOWS THIS HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR YEARS!! Come on, you KNOW you've been joking about priests and boys since before high school.
posted by matty at 11:45 PM PST - 4 comments
South High School Sucks but not for the normal reasons that most students give. Apparently four students were suspended for
a poll on their website, "the multiple-choice topic of whether a certain assistant principal at the school most closely resembles a witch, Big Bird, or a dead body." David tells CityPages.com that school officials told him the poll is a "death threat."
So they've taken the ball and done something positive with it. They've been mentioned in the
WSJ opinion pages, and they're starting a
coalition that's attempting to help kids practice free speech in their schools.
posted by Ufez Jones at 11:37 PM PST - 4 comments
Under 5,000 Xboxes sold in Japan last week. This is compared to 100k Playstation2s and 25k Gamecubes. Since its launch, the Xbox has sold 190k units in Japan versus the Playstation's 980k units sold in the first 3 days.
Is the Xbox doomed in the notoriously tough Japan gaming market, or does the Xbox just need a price cut to stay competitive?
posted by jragon at 4:00 PM PST - 30 comments
The Pulitzer Prizes 2002. The New York Times gets 7; Richard Russo's "Empire Falls" gets Best Fiction; and Best On-Screen Kiss goes to Britney Spears and the guy from "Crossroads" because it made jurists William Safire and Henry Louis Gates Jr. "all teary-eyed."
posted by adrober at 2:51 PM PST - 10 comments
U.S. Foreign Policy: Attention! Right Face! Forward, March. "...with no foreign policy experience, Dubya was essentially a blank slate, and U.S. foreign policy has been up for grabs since he took the oath of office. As everyone now knows, the main contestants consisted of two factions: one headed by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who represents continuity of policy with both Bush's father and Clinton; the other, led by Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, whose vision is far more sweeping, not to say Manichean. Since September 11, the latter faction has emerged as dominant and is using the 'war against terrorism' to impose its own, quite radical ideas on U.S. foreign policy and the global order. At their core, those ideas call for a world order based on U.S. supremacy and enforced by U.S. military power--a unipolar world in which the U.S. imposes the rules but, because of its own self-evident goodness, is not necessarily bound by them."
Ah, not quite
lebensraum (yet), but "benevolent"
Bushists bearing
bratwurst abound.
posted by fold_and_mutilate at 1:15 PM PST - 56 comments
Major muckraking - Greg Palast on C-Span. God I love C-Span, sitting here in the UK with a broadband connection, going thru the archive. You'd
never see an anti-corporate author given a polite 50 minutes to explain his book in Britain. I'm only wondering when the Homeland Security hawks will get round to rapping the knuckles of Mr. Lamb's outstanding operation.
posted by theplayethic at 12:37 PM PST - 6 comments
Internet Killed The Porn Magnate? "...but the explosion of pornography on the Internet in ever more customized ways may accomplish what the Meese commission on pornography, the Rev. Jerry Falwell and Andrea Dworkin, the antipornography activist, failed to do: the shuttering of Penthouse.
"I'm delighted that Mr. Guccione may be going out of business," Ms. Dworkin said. "The problem is that he is being replaced, quite possibly, by something that is much worse.""
posted by owillis at 2:20 AM PST - 20 comments
Going,
going,
gone. Despite royalty costs that are lower than for commercial stations, numerous college and community radio stations have either shut down their Internet streams or on the verge of doing so. It's not just royalties killing these webcasts -- there are also regulations that require college stations to report every song they play and restrictions that would force college stations to police how often they play any given artist.
Stations are trying to unite and fight these restrictions, but is it too little, too late? Nearly twenty webcasts have already gone under...
posted by insomnia_lj at 1:13 AM PST - 9 comments
